Facebook is making progress, albeit slow progress, toward its ambitious goal of connecting the roughly 4 billion people around the world who lack internet access.
I find it amazing in the UK that there are still businesses that do not have suitable connectivity to run their companies...we recently heard an amusing, and slightly alarming, anecdote from one of our customers: She advised that she has to climb a ladder outside of her office to get a mobile signal! Thankfully, we found her a suitable solution to avoid the fire brigade having to be called the next time that she needs to download her e-mails.
You don't have to be one of the 4 billion unconnected if you are in the UK, so make sure you check your connectivity options, there is always a way to be super connected, without the need to build your own mobile network.
Somewhat counter-intuitively; cell towers aren’t typically the priciest components of a cellular network. Rather the civil and “supporting infrastructure” costs involved — that is to say, the land, power and network backbone needed to support the towers often represent a far bigger slice of upfront investment than the cellular access points themselves. OpenCellular’s endgame is to develop a cost-effective solution tailored to the needs of cell providers in remote nations, the rural villages and towns just beyond range of major cellular services.
Facebook is making progress toward its ambitious goal of connecting the roughly 4 billion people around the world who lack internet access. On Wednesday, the social network took the wraps off OpenCellular, an open-source initiative aimed at easing the market barriers to entry for mobile carriers in developing countries. Kashif Ali, the Facebook engineer who headed the project, laid out the details in an extensive post on Facebook’s Code blog. The project is about affordability, “One of the reasons the expansion of cellular networks has stalled is that the ecosystem is constrained,” explained Ali. “Traditional cellular infrastructure can be very expensive, making it difficult for operators to deploy it everywhere and for smaller organisations or individuals to solve hyper-local connectivity challenges. It’s often unaffordable for them to attempt to extend network access in both rural and developed communities.”
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/facebook-opencellular-open-source/
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